


a lonely impulse of delight

by spinnerofyarns



Category: Babylon Berlin (TV)
Genre: Gen, Gore, Implied/Referenced Suicide, In The Flesh AU, Major Character Undeath, Medical, Partially Deceased Syndrome, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Zombies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:49:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28272654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spinnerofyarns/pseuds/spinnerofyarns
Summary: I balanced all, brought all to mind,The years to come seemed waste of breath,A waste of breath the years behindIn balance with this life, this death.---A Babylon Berlin AU where Gereon - and several other characters - are undead. Or rather, Partially Deceased. Based on the BBC show In The Flesh and its interpretation of undeath.---Title and summary quote from "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" by William Butler Yeats.
Relationships: Gereon Rath & Charlotte Ritter
Kudos: 7





	a lonely impulse of delight

Over a decade later, Gereon Rath still wakes with the taste of dirt and blood in his mouth, hands scrabbling frantically at the scar across his throat, Anno’s voice ringing in his ears. He supposes that, if his heart still beat, it would be racing.

He checks his watch, then reaches into his nightstand for the next dose of his medication. He prepares the injector, and feels around for the port at the back of his neck that leads directly to his spinal cord. This step would be much easier with another person to help, but no one in Berlin can ever find out about his condition.

The first minute after the injection is always the worst - he can feel the blood and dirt in his throat and under his nails, the gash across his neck throbs as though it is still fresh, and his vision goes dark. Gereon clenches his jaw and waits for the nightmare to retreat.

The doctors at the Centre had told him the flashbacks would stop eventually. 12 years seems like a fair bit longer than “eventually”.

Gereon gets out of bed and stumbles over to the wash basin. The knee he injured in the war never did heal properly, leaving him with a slightly uneven gait. One of the fun little perks of being undead, he supposes. Or rather, “Partially Deceased.” 

The term makes him scoff. He isn’t _partially_ deceased - he is fully, entirely deceased. No pulse. No blood. Dead as the proverbial doornail. And no lenses or cover-up mousse will ever change that fact.

Gereon smooths the mousse - greasepaint, really, as though he’s a clown - over his greyish white skin, adding an extra layer over the gash on his neck to cover the threads holding it together, and wipes his hands on a towel before putting in a pair of ice-blue lenses that make his eyes sting after an hour or so. He gets dressed, making sure the collar of his shirt and jacket cover both his scar and the port on his neck. The Partially Deceased have managed to reintegrate into Berlin society better than in Cologne, but not in the police department. If anyone Gereon works with finds out about his…condition, he has no doubt that he will be unceremoniously sacked and put on the first train back to Cologne. And that’s if he’s lucky enough not to get dumped in another Centre.

One small upside of the condition, Gereon supposes, is that he no longer needs to eat or drink. He can’t, in fact - his parents tried to force him to eat dinner with them when he first came home from the Centre, and the night ended with him vomiting a thick black tar-like fluid. He’s glad to be able to exist without eating, though he does miss coffee sometimes. 

Before heading out for the day, Gereon pauses by the door and recites the affirmation drilled into him at the Centre. “I am a Partially Deceased Syndrome Sufferer and what I did in my untreated state was not my fault.” It feels hollow - he doesn’t even _remember_ his so-called “untreated state”, everything between the trench and the Centre is a blank spot in his mind, so the words hold no real weight for him - but he’s gotten into the habit of reciting them every morning anyway.

Outside on the street, Gereon lights a cigarette. It no longer gives him the clarity it did when he was alive, but it’s a habit too deeply ingrained to break. Besides, he has no reason to quit now - it’s not as though he could die a second time.

At work, Gereon barely makes it inside the building before Bruno Wolter claps him on the shoulder.

“What are your plans for tonight, Rath?” he asks. Gereon starts to mumble something vague and noncommittal but Bruno cuts him off.

“Whatever they are, cancel them,” he says. “We found König’s studio and we’re going to raid it tonight while he’s shooting his new porno.”

Gereon forces a smile. “Oh, great, we’ll have the film in no time.” And his job will be done and he’ll be on his way back to Cologne and to his father and to that cold, dark, crushingly miserable house.

For a few moments he toys with the idea of sabotaging tonight’s raid. He could steal the address and warn König in advance, and buy himself a few more weeks in Berlin. A few more weeks of _freedom_.

He stops that train of thought in its tracks. Somehow, he’s sure his father will figure it out and he’ll be in for it when he does eventually come back to Cologne.

Anno should have been the one to come back. Come back from the grave, come back from the front, come back shining and glorious. Gereon’s family had made that abundantly clear up on his return. Nobody could understand how it was that _he_ had been chosen, brought back from the dead for a second chance, and Anno had not.

Nobody could understand much of anything about the Rising, even all these years later. None of the doctors or scientists working with the Partially Deceased could understand why, just a few weeks before the Armistice, young fallen boys had suddenly started rising from the trenches, or why some victims of the Spanish flu had clawed their way out of their graves. There was no discernible pattern to who rose and who didn’t, no reasonable explanation.

Some people said it was something Biblical. Young boys who died for the sins of their countries suddenly reborn, invulnerable and glorious.

None of the people saying that were Partially Deceased, as far as Gereon knew. They didn’t know what he knew, the horrible sensory memory of cracking through a human skull and the texture of a brain against his teeth that haunted him in the moments after his injections. There was absolutely nothing holy about it.

Bruno is talking about something – his weekend plans, maybe? Gereon isn’t really paying attention, but he nods along until Bruno finishes his story and pats him on the shoulder again, saying “Now go do some paperwork or something, and I’ll see you tonight.” He heads off down the hall, and Gereon sits down at his desk and lights another cigarette.

\---

“You’re a sight,” Doris whispers as Lotte lines up beside her in the lobby of the Castle. “Did you sleep at all?”

“Nope,” Lotte says, snapping her chewing gum. “If you sleep you miss out on all the fun.”

“If I didn’t know better,” Doris says, “I’d think you were the one who’s undead.”

“Speaking of,” Lotte says, “may I?” She gently wipes a spot of mousse off Doris’s collar.

“Thanks,” Doris says. Lotte rubs the mousse between her fingers.

“I’d kill for this stuff,” she sighs. “Or die for it, I guess. It’s better than any powder in the shops.”

“Our nation’s finest scientists at work,” Doris jokes. Lotte snorts, and catches Gräf’s eye as he comes down the stairs. She waves, and he briefly smiles at her before disappearing down the hall, presumably to his darkroom.

“Ladies!” The manager’s voice brings their attention to her. “We have a fair bit of work for you today…” As she lists off the assignments, the young women scramble for them. Lotte and Doris end up in the basement, typing up Dr. Schwartz’s old pathology notes.

“Lotte,” Doris pleads in the elevator on the way down, “please can you do the talking? I always get the creeps from him, like he wants to cut me open.” She shudders.

“Of course,” Lotte promises. Dr. Schwartz’s interest in the Partially Decesased is common knowledge at the precinct – he has repeatedly applied to join the scientists working on Neurotriptyline but for one reason or another has received rejection after rejection. So instead he stays down in the morgue, hoping that one of the murder victims on his slab will rise from the dead someday.

“Good morning, ladies!” he calls as Doris and Lotte enter the morgue. “I assume you’re here for the reports?”

“You’d be correct,” Lotte answers, smiling as Dr. Schwartz hands her and Doris each a box of files.

“I’m glad I’ve got you to help me out, I am terribly behind on these things and the commissioner is _insisting_ on having everything typed for legibility. There’s an office round the corner back there,” he says. “Just type those up and file the new versions with the old ones. Yell if either of you needs _anything_.”

When he leaves, Doris grimaces. “I always feel like I’m back at the Centre when I talk to him,” she says. “Like he’s about to check my port or inject me or something.”

“Well, so long as I’m with you he’s not getting anywhere near your port,” Lotte promises. “Speaking of, do you need any help with that?”

“No, my sister did it for me this morning, but thanks for asking. Now, how do you want to split up the work?”

“How about…you read and I type until lunchtime, and then we’ll switch?”

“Sounds good to me,” Doris says, perching on the desk and pulling the oldest file out of the box. “Oh damn, this is from ages ago! April 6, 1918. He wasn’t kidding about being way behind, huh?”

Lotte chuckles. “I guess he meant to get to them when he got a typewriter in here but people just kept getting murdered and distracting him. I wonder if he’s got any from the Rising…” She trails off when she sees Doris’s pinched uncomfortable face. “Sorry. I’m an idiot.”

“It’s all right,” Doris says. “I just…don’t like thinking about it. I don’t even remember it properly, really – some people got their memories back with the drugs but mine are still a big ugly blur.”

Lotte nods, and wonders not for the first time what happened to her friend Greta. They lost touch before the Rising, both of them working too many different jobs to have the time or energy for a friendship, and though Lotte has tried to track her down, she kept hitting dead ends in her search.

“Anyway,” Doris says, “let’s start with this one. April 6, 1918, young man, approximately 25 years old, multiple stab wounds to the torso…”

\---

König’s studio is on the top floor of an old building that at first glance appears to be abandoned. As Gereon waits with Bruno for the green light to break down the door, his hand starts to shake. He checks his watch and realizes that he’s overdue for his Neurotriptyline injection.

“I’ll be right back,” he tells Bruno. “Bathroom.” He knows there’s one a few flights down.

“Nervous stomach?” Bruno asks with a laugh.

“Something like that.”

“Go, go, we’ve got time.”

Gereon locks the bathroom door behind him before taking the portable injector, pre-loaded with a single dose, out of his inside pocket. Taking a deep breath, he positions it at the back of his neck, fitting it carefully into the port. He presses the plunger and squeezes his eyes shut as the cold – always cold, even though it’s been inside his coat all day – liquid seeps into his nervous system. He grits his teeth as images of blood and death and Anno’s twisted agonized face float in front of him. When they have faded, he puts away the injector and rejoins his colleagues on the stairs.

It all goes unbelievably, catastrophically wrong. They get König, that part is easy enough, but when Gereon and Stephan try to corner one of the pornographer’s associates, he runs. Gereon chases him up to the roof – dropping his gun in someone’s courtyard in the process – and only manages to avoid being shot because Bruno leaps out of a hidden fire door and tackles the suspect.

“What,” he pants, “they didn’t teach you to shoot in Cologne?”

Gereon shrugs apologetically. “I dropped my gun.”

“Butterfingers.” Bruno pulls the bullet that nearly hit Gereon out of the window frame where it lodged. “You’re lucky,” he says to the handcuffed suspect. “If not for me, you’d be charged as a cop-killer. And I can’t imagine the judge would be too kind to a Rotter.”

Sure enough, when Gereon looks at the man’s face he sees that one of his contacts has fallen out during the struggle to reveal the same grey iris and ragged-edged pupil that Gereon knows are hidden behind his own lenses. He tenses his jaw – he’s heard the slur before, of course, even said it a few times trying to fit in with his colleagues in Cologne, but hearing it from a coworker, especially someone as close as Bruno, is just another reminder that he came back wrong, and that no matter how hard he tries he’ll never fit in with the living.

Bruno spends a few more minutes bullying the suspect – who identifies himself as Franz Krajewski, a veteran scraping by on questionably legal odd jobs – but eventually releases him and returns with Gereon to the police station just as the sun is rising.

“He used to be a cop, Krajewski,” Bruno says in the car. “Before the war. And then he came back as a Rotter and tried to rejoin but…well, we can’t have one of those on the force, can we? I mean how would it look, a cop showing up at a murder scene and making a meal of the victim’s brain? I know they say those drugs keep them normal but…one missed dose is all it takes, you know?”

Gereon remains silent. Bruno scrutinizes him.

“You in there?” he asks. Gereon feigns a yawn.

“Just…tired,” he says. “Might just go back to my hotel and try to get a few hours of sleep and come in this afternoon.” It’s nearly time for his morning Neurotriptyline dose too.

“Good idea,” Bruno says. He pulls Krajewski’s bullet out of his pocket and hands it to Gereon. “A souvenir of your time in the capital,” he jokes.

Gereon thinks he would prefer a postcard.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been noodling around with this idea for a long time - the Rising and the entire In The Flesh universe transposes so well onto a post-WWI space with the idea of "coming back wrong" and the war and pandemic causing death on an unprecedented scale. I'm planning to basically re-trace and condense the plot of the first two seasons with some...minor deviations.


End file.
